A Senate Republican fiscal hawk offered a 74-page menu of Defense Department spending cuts Thursday that could save taxpayers nearly $68 billion over 10 years. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said he and his staff had identified several categories of non-defense spending at the Pentagon, outlays which he said had little to do with national security.

At a Capitol Hill press conference, Coburn accused his fellow Senate Republicans of having a blind eye on spending. He summed up their approach as Its OK to cut spending anywhere except the Defense Department.

But, he said to be legitimate and have any integrity on the issue everything has to be on the table.

In the fiscal year which ended Sept. 30, defense outlays amounted to $651 billion, 18 percent of total federal spending, which was a decline of about 3 percent from the prior fiscal year.

One target of Coburns proposed cuts is personnel. He said there were too many admirals and other high-ranking officers for the size of the military. We almost now have an admiral for every ship in the Navy, he told reporters.

I know there is savings to be had in the Military. I might have an issue with replacing some military jobs with civilian personnel. I may be wrong, but I seem to remember that when military gets replaced by civilians, civilians are paid a lot more. So while defense spending may go down, overall spending will go up. I could be wrong, but knowing our govt, I bet I’m not.

IMO the benefit of properly spent defense spending results in a safer existence for my family, countrymen and myself.

I could care less what effect the dollars thus spent have on the economy.

As to your first point, since the taxpayers you're taking the money spent on entitlements from would have spent that money similarly (with less going to junk food, porn & booze presumably) I don't see what benefit entitlement spending has to the larger economy at all.

Please. One CVBG could wipe out the entire navies of the entire world in 1915. There is more to a navy than counting boats. The rest of the world's fleets combined couldn't match the USN today.

What are these assholes shooting for, a Davy Crockett era defense strategy?

You mean when we didn't try to police the globe and send America's best to bleed for other nations? I'd shoot for that. We've been on the offense since 1898. The renaming of the War Department was entirely Orwellian (and done by the Democrats).

Wake up. We're bankrupting ourselves with warfare abroad and welfare at home, just like Rome.

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